The case of free speech v. fake news is among other things about network structure and topology… or, more to the point, valuation.
The complexity of the debate is captured in a recent post by Albert Wenger, from which the following two extracts set the stage.
A new form…
in a new context…
While in another open tab you read the post in its entirety and contemplate the parallels of social media and banking, I’ll meander here a bit with a related train of thought, more or less around the two sides of the anti-trust conundrum…
- The big social network need not be broken into pieces just to be diminished.
- That is so hard and cumbersome, with unpredictable effects.
- Instead, it would be simple, fast, and almost foolproof, merely to render the network centralized –
- with a chief editor, a staff in charge of what gets published, when, and where –
- and the resulting magazine becomes as valuable as the others.
Consciously or by happenstance, it feels like the path there is clearing.
Related: The future bank
Speculative Fiction 